Customer First Philosophy

We often read customer first policy in frames hanging on office walls, but we rarely see this in action during difficult situation.

Customer first philosophy is also one of the frequently conducted training programs in companies but angry and complaining customers are either labelled as the “pampahirap sa trabaho” (the reason why work is not fun) or fraud(complaining to gain something) or a demolition agent from the competitor.

Allow me to share an unfortunate incident that was handled well and led to a happy ending.

• “Consumers are our lifeblood, the center of the doughnut”
• “There is no substitute for quality in our service to consumers”

These are the first two of the seven corporate values of Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, and I have the first hand experience how this easily recited but challenging to implement philosophy is carried out.

One of the regular places I hang-out is KK, so in one of our family bonding time, my son and I chose to chill at KK SM Manila while waiting for wifey and daughter from shopping. In the middle of doughnut feasting and playing with my MacBook Pro at the same time, what every Mac owner feared happened in front of my eyes- a not so little quantity of water was on my unit.

The unthinkable happened, drops of water fell from the A/C unit above our dining table, directly to the keyboard of my MacBook Pro. I immediately called the attention of the manager and relayed the horrifying (at least to me) incident. The manager invited this panicking customer to go to iStudio and get technical opinion. From there, we were advised that some MBP (MacBook Pro) units survived similar incident but warranty may have been voided. The technician also told us to keep the unit off and inverted for 24 hours.

Now, If you’re a Mac owner, what would you feel after hearing those words?

the replacement MBP I received from Krispy Kreme

To cut the story short, my MBP survived the water spillage but Krispy Kreme, living true to their customer first philosophy decided to replace my unit with a brand new one with the same specs. As their customer, KK listened to this customer and agreed that the damage caused by water will cost me 3 years worth of warranty.

In the middle of all this, two high ranking members of management, the IT and Operations heads respectively, were hands-on with the incident and talked with me directly.

It took two weeks to replace the unit because of the Holy week holidays, but the actions of Krispy Kreme is worth this blog post and highly commendable. Happy endings are stories that are worth telling.

As management consultant, hats off to KK for “walking the talk” on their “customer first philosophy”. One happy customer here.